Last week, we posted a story on a theme tutorial sponsored by IBM developerWorks. The tutorial was targeted at non-programmers who wish to theme window decorations, icons, sounds, colors, etc. However, at the widget level, KDE/Qt also offers a more powerful type of "theming" referred to as widget styles, which must be programmed. Rik Hemsley recently authored a tutorial for programming KDE styles (download the tutorial and sample code here). The tutorial also points to the ability to create theme-based styles; these basically allow you to modify a coded style using pixmaps. More information on theme-based coded styles is available here from mosfet.org.

Comments

Please, give us a theme-editor! Its SOOO much work to create a theme, and it becomes even more when you need to search for all the specifications of the themes for yourself.

I REALLY don't know about all that stuff, but would it be so hard to have a tree view with all necessary icons on the left, and for each one, an embedded krayon-part on the right? Something like that would make it so much easier!

Also, many other windowmanagers have nice themes. But I think the one who has the most is Windows. Well, not exactly windows, but Windowblinds, which is for windows. Its an add-on software, making windows completely themeable. It's really great and there are a lot of free (?!) themes available for download. Check it out on www.windowblinds.net. It uses .wba files for themes. Could someone extend the KDE1 Theme importer to use these .wba files?

I'm right here ;-) After spending about a year playing around with widget styles, KWin styles, and theme engines prior to the release of KDE2.0, I got rather bored doing theme oriented stuff. Lately I've been playing around with Pixie, and am toying around with a few new apps.

The problem has been it's been difficult to get new developers to take over the theme stuff. Luckily, there has been renewed interest and coding by people like Gallium, who has been doing some neat stuff like importing iceWM themes and some new KWin stuff.

You can expect some new widget styles from me, but that's about it as far as themes go. Now I want to hack apps :)

That's too bad. Well, not for you, but for the look and style of KDE. The KDE project needs a Mosfet, someone who knows how to create eye-candy, not only for the icons (which Torsten does well) but to the desktop as a whole.

Actually, since you stopped working on this, GNOME has caught up quite a bit when it comes to style and elegance. If the KDE project is going to keep improving its looks, it needs a new Mosfet. Who? I don't know.

I was thinking about WindowBlinds the other day, so I went over and downloaded one of their themes. It had a prominent disclaimer to the effect that you can't use the theme with anything but WindowBlinds. It's probably a standard-issue disclaimer that is in all the WindowBlinds themes. So even if someone could make a WindowBlinds theme importer, it wouldn't be legal to use it. While this probably wouldn't stop anyone from using it, it would prevent KDE from including it in the official KDE packages. Those pesky lawyers always ruin our fun :-(